Techno
by Thief of Black Winged Hearts
Summary: War has come between the humans and the fairies. Artemis never kidnaps Holly, and at the tender age of fifteen is working for the government, keeping the fairy race away from humanity. Yet, fate still dictates for a certain chance meeting. AU Hartemis


Hey-ho to all you people of . God, it has been a while! seriously, I haven't posted something since, like, this summer! I do feel kind of bad about it though, especially for the people reading Fullmetal Thunder. But the honest truth is, classes are eating up all of my time. I've barely have a moment for the past three months, and the musical starts after vacation! Oh well. I did write this Christmas Day, having nothing better to do while we tried to figure out how my new phone could possibly unlocked! Heh heh...long story.

Anyway... I'm going to call this a brief glimpse into an AU I thought up. The original prompt was given to me by my beta, Showpeople, and it was "War makes for strange bedfellows.". Do NOT ask me how I got from that to what we see here. Some things, like my mind and the quantum mechanics of relationships, cannot be explained. There may be more chapters to this, or I may get lazy and let it stand alone.

By the way, read Showpeople's work. It's awesome! Plug, plug ,plug...

I don't own the original premise, though I can put my fingerprint on Zippy, Yuki, and Spry.

Without further ado...

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><p><span>Techno<span>

The moon was high, that night, full and ripe with the promise of the coming days. Or at least, the coming days used to be filled with promise, back in another lifetime which Artemis could hardly remember. These days, the rising of the sun only seemed to bring more news of kidnapped humans and foiled attempts at sabotaging the workings of the human race. Artemis would know; he was, after all, the lead tactician currently engaged in a silent warfare against the fairy race. And best of all, he was most certainly the brightest, even at fifteen years old. Only Minerva was anywhere near his range of abilities, sweet twelve year old with blond ringlets, a fascination with ponies, and the ability to strip a computer down to its components in less than twenty-five seconds.

Three years ago, Artemis had been in the midst of investigating a series of phenomena that he believed would lead to the discovery of a subterranean people. They were most commonly known as fairies, or the Fair Folk 'round his neck of the woods. He was doing his research and believed that there were more subtypes to this general classification, but at that point he was running up against some solid evidence that pointed to the validation of his hypothesis. Translated from Artemis-speak, he was close to a breakthrough that would rock most of the sentient world as he knew it. He had a plan forming in the back of his mind, about what he might do with this capital information, something still in the vague formation process that involved kidnapping and gold. Given more time, he would surely have wrecked his own personal form of catastrophe upon these small, subterranean dwellers. That is, of Giovanni Zito had not chanced upon a stray radio transmission coming from one of their vessels as it passed under his summer home in Nice. This freak accident would probably have been contained (after all, Artemis had to give these people credit for hiding from hi- the human race for so long), if Giovanni, fearing alien attack, had blabbed the information to every media center he could contact in short notice. And considering the size of his financial assets, short notice meant a lot of media. Artemis had quietly fumed in his room in Fowl Manor while the laughingstock story was broadcasted over every news channel the television had to offer. He knew that while the majority of the human race might see this as a hoax, there were too many people currently informed, and the hard evidence was so irrefutable, for someone not to realize and act. His personal project was no more than a shouldering pile of ruin and ashes in a matter of minutes.

From there, six months after ten separate well-known (and more importantly, well-liked) scientists had shared their flawless proof with the general public, a message was sent from underground to the nearest Peace Conference at Geneva, the largest in the past decade. And audio transmission came to the leaders, explaining their underground world of life and extending a general hand of peace and friendship. After the dust settles, five delegates had shouted vague threats towards their previously undiscovered neighbors (Artemis fumed a little more), three had passed out in dead faints, and six were ready to start the modern version of the Crusades. Artemis sighed and shook his head. Sometimes his race disappointed him quite a bit. They should have at least pretended to be friendly so they could extort them later.

Thus the largest silent war since the Cold War between Russia and The United States began. The events of the peace conference were quietly shushed, as were the afore-mentioned scientists. Then, every nation had convened and founded a task force with a two-fold goal; to keep these Fair Folk from interfering with the affairs of the human race, and to find a way to eliminate those insidious pests in one fell swoop. Artemis was coerced into a tech position on the team with an exorbitant fee and the promise of a challenge unlike any he had previously experienced. These last two years had been spent arming the whole of the important parts of the internet with every firewall he could think of, only to have discovered an almost equal adversary in the presence the team had quietly dubbed The HACKer. It seemed no matter how many firewalls he threw up, no matter how difficult the code, all of his defenses seemed to be breached in a matter. It was the most fun Artemis had had since his fourth birthday, when he had first broken into the inter-web security of the Swiss Bank. His father had been so proud.

At least, that is what he used to think.

Now, at the older and more mature age of fifteen, he realized the long days and longer nights were beginning to take their toll on him. Too many times he had been woken in the middle of the night, barely in adequate dress, and having to put his pants on as he ran down the hallway to fend off the latest cyber attack. After a month away from his four poster bed, Artemis had broken down to the point where he had asked the tech team to more their base to his manor. While he had been, at first, both opposed and uncomfortable with the idea of anyone but Butler, Juliet, him mother, and him living in the house for an extended period of time, he found that he had gradually adjusted to the presence of other human beings. Butler said his team was having a softening effect on him. Artemis, in his own polite way, had told him to shut up.

It _was_ his team, seeing as how it was his house they were residing in and he was the smartest of the bunch, even if only just in some cases. There was Minerva, who was now thirteen (as of last week) and liked to text on her cell phone one-handed while placing an interlocking nexus defense over the hard-drive of the president of the United States. She was starting to mature into a young woman, and Artemis was dreading having to deal with the pubescent tantrums of a teenage girl this was going to ensue. While undeniably brilliant, Minerva did not have as close a reign over her emotional state as Artemis did. Zepino, or "Zippy" Briarback, their hardware and malware tech, was a twenty-six year old grad student from Great Brittan who liked to hack Air Bases and pretend to fire missiles in his spare time. He could both stop a virus in his tracks and make a basic workable hard drive in under two minutes. He claimed, however, that he had been hung-over that day and therefore could do it faster. Argus Brittle, otherwise known as Spry, was a grizzled, wizened old man who used to be a low-time fencer of valuable artifacts over the internet, working out of a grubby café down in Dublin. However, the police had tracked him down and offered this as a way of erasing his debt to society. He and Artemis played this little game where Spry tried to steal things and Artemis stopped him and then threatened him bodily harm in the most charming, pleasant voice he could muster. They would always walk away from such an encounter mutually satisfied. And finally, there was Yuki Arisawa from Tokyo, Japan. She was twenty-one, spoke English with a flawless accent, and could speak twenty-nine languages besides. Not only was she an impressive linguist, but she also had nearly as many degrees as Artemis, could write programs that made code look like flawless Russian, and was stunningly beautiful to boot. She made up for this with and icy personality and a lack of social grace that, again, rivaled Artemis's own. Zippy spent almost all of his time trying to 'pick her up', as Juliet had said. Doubtless these tactics would get him anything in the future other than the verbal equivalent to an ice bullet between the eyes.

Before this motley group had moved into his house, Artemis had had a personality that bordered on sociopathic, next to no friends (none if you didn't count Juliet and Butler), and a general disdain for humanity in general. Now, he had sociopathic tendencies but slightly more social skills, a slight disdain for his team members, and a more marked disdain for the rest of humanity. Butler called it making friends. Artemis just thought he was going soft.

Not only were the days intellectually challenging, they were also having to guard themselves at every turn now. It had been a year into their little venture when Zippy had accidentally put his elbow on the freeze frame button on the security panel while trying to 'sweet-talk' Yuki (honestly, who came up with these absurd phrases?), and hard captures the figures of five diminutive figures creeping up the front drive. Artemis had activated the front security immediately, and the next five minutes were spent frantically jury-rigging a filter of sorts that would allow Butler to go out there and take care of the problem. Seven minutes later, Butler had walked out the front door. Catching sight of his massive figure, the figures in black had all extended wings from their backs and disappeared into the heavens. Dinner that night had been filled with loud debate and excited remarks. They had done it; captured the first visual proof that these creatures they had been proposed fighting for the past year actually existed. Reluctantly, they had sent the data they gathered back to the group headquarters, and had spent the rest of the night analyzing what they saw, forming questions, and postulating theories. They had refused all attempts at outside interference (at this point, they had begun to think of themselves as a single entity), but were no longer allowed to leave the house without armed guards outfitted with the new filters they had designed (they had given the patent to Artemis because, after all, it was his house) and at least one Butler. Ever since that first time, more attempts had been made to enter the house, but Butler and the new defense system had been able to rebuff them. They all wondered whether the small intruders were there for information gathering or for a darker, more sinister purpose. They were the center of all the tech personnel for the resistance of the human race. Butler had taken to sleeping outside the door of his room in case of intruders.

So here he sat, sitting on the edge of his bed and staring up at the moon, wondering when he had turned so maudlin. He slept in slacks and a white button down shirt now, after the time where Yuki had burst into his room at two o'clock at night to inform him there was a serious breach for the West Coast server that needed to be addressed immediately. Totally oblivious of Artemis's total mortification at being caught wearing only his red Armani boxers. He hadn't been able to look her in the eye for weeks. She had been totally oblivious to this too. Thank god for Yuki's inability to read the finer points of human emotion.

He was interrupted from his pointless musings by a sound on his balcony, right outside his glass double doors. Train of thought broken, curiosity aroused, he rose from his bed as silently and as gracefully as he could possibly manage. Usually this was, well, not very, but he managed to not trip over his own feet on his way to the glass doors. Gently, he eased the door handle down and pushed out, letting the warm night air suffuse his room. He should not be doing this. He should be calling Butler right now, but his abundant curiosity won out over his need for protection and fear of embarrassment. It might be nothing, after all.

Might be nothing, except for the little rivulets of blood that were dripping onto the balcony from seemingly empty air.

"Fascinating," Artemis breathed without thought, and was startled in turn by the sound of surprised movement. He fervently wished he had not left his filter glasses on his bedside table. "Wait," he called in a hushed voice, and the sound of movement stopped. He had not expected that to actually work, but he was glad he had tried that regardless. "Please, I believe you are injured and are dripping blood on my perfectly good banister. Why don't you come inside, so I, well not me but Butler, can tend to your injuries?" He tried to keep his voice low and soothing, like with a wild animal. Good fairy. Niiiiccee fairy. Just come a little close, my dear, said the spider to the fly. Instead of being soothed, however, the owner of the blood currently trailing its way through the patio seemed to have been spooked even more. Artemis heard some clearly agitated movements and was frightened he had scared the creature off for good. However, to his eternal amazement, a solid figure shimmered into view, like some stepping out of a heat mirage or a pool of deep water.

The figure that appeared was dressed in a matte black jumpsuit, with gloved hands and black combat boots on her feet. A pair of shiny double wings, made of some type of polymer, from the looks of it, was strapped to her back with some sort of rigging harness. The only thing visible was her, for the creature was undeniably female, face. Her skin was the color of mocha, a light creamy brown with a complexion that every woman and most men on the planet would die for. Her face was heart shaped, high cheekbones melting into the angles of her face, giving an otherworldly appearance to her otherwise normal features. Her lips were perfect bows, her eyes delightfully angular and beautifully hazel. Blazing auburn hair, cropped short but still quite feminine, fell wildly around her face, and when she tilted her head and narrowed her eye at him, he saw the tip of a single pointed ear rising out of the fiery tide. But her cheeks had an unnatural pallor, and one slim hand covered a jagged wound that ran around her rib cage and down the front of her stomach. A streak of blood marred her otherwise flawless face.

"Stay back human. You don't know what you're dealing with," said the fairy, strong, free, head raised proudly in defiance despite the fact that her body trembled and she was bleeding out on his balcony floor.

"Beautiful," said Artemis softly, seeming as if he was in a trance. She was defiance. She was perfection. She was a paragon a grace, of otherworldly beauty. She was…not human. "Beautiful," he said, slightly louder, as he took one step forward as if walking in a dream and held out is hand.

Then everything happened at once; Butler slammed into the room, gun drawn and roaring, Artemis jerked his head and blinked rapidly, as if coming back to himself, and the fairy's eyes rolled backwards as she passed out, falling backwards from the rail onto the hard ground below.

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><p>If someone actually wants to read more of this, review. It's that oh so subtle way of letting me know I'm loved.<p> 


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